The cheapest way to invoice clients: three options and the arithmetic
Invoicing software is the cheapest category we cover and the one where people most often pay for the wrong thing. The reason is that the subscription is the visible number and the payment processing is the expensive one. Get the second number right and the first mostly stops mattering.
The three options
| PDF + bank transfer | Wave Starter | FreshBooks Lite | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription | $0 | $0 | $23/mo · $276/yr |
| Card fee | Not offered | 2.9% + $0.60 | Not published |
| Billable clients | Unlimited | No stated cap | 5 |
| Invoices | Manual | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Recurring invoices | No | Yes | Yes |
| Bookkeeping records | Your spreadsheet | Included | Included |
| Late-payment reminders | Manual | On Pro, with online payments | Yes |
Start with the fee, because it is most of the cost
Ten invoices a month at an average of $800 is $8,000 of revenue. Run that through Wave's published rate:
10 × ($800 × 2.9% + $0.60) = $238 a month, $2,856 a year.
Against a subscription cost of zero. Now change one variable — the client pays by bank transfer instead of card — and the same ten invoices cost $0 a year, with the same software, the same bookkeeping records and the same unlimited invoices.
That is the entire decision for a freelancer. Not Wave versus FreshBooks. Card versus transfer.
The invoice count barely matters; the average size very much does
A flat per-transaction component and a percentage component behave differently as invoice size changes. Both totals below are Wave Starter on the same monthly revenue of $9,000:
- 3 invoices of $3,000: 3 × ($87 + $0.60) = $262.80 a month, $3,154 a year.
- 30 invoices of $300: 30 × ($8.70 + $0.60) = $279 a month, $3,348 a year.
Ten times the invoices on the same revenue costs $194 more a year. The percentage is doing almost all the work, and no amount of shopping for a cheaper subscription changes it. This is why "which invoicing tool is cheapest" is usually the wrong question — the answer is "whichever one lets your clients pay without a card, or none of them".
Where Wave Pro flips, and where it does not
Wave Pro is $19 a month (or $190 a year) and removes the $0.60 on the first ten card transactions each month. Compare at ten invoices a month:
- Starter: $238 a month in fees.
- Pro: $232 in fees plus $19 subscription = $251 a month.
Pro costs $13 a month more at exactly ten transactions, because $19 of subscription buys back only $6 of fees. The crossover is where 60 cents a transaction exceeds $19 — around 32 card payments a month. Below that, Pro is a subscription you bought for a saving you were not making. Above it, it pays. Almost nobody checks this before upgrading, because the pricing page frames Pro as "look more polished, save more time", which is a different pitch entirely.
FreshBooks, and the cap that sets the real entry price
FreshBooks Lite is $23 a month and caps at five billable clients. Five. The sixth client — which is what growth looks like — pushes you to Plus at $43, or $516 a year. Premium at $70 removes the cap entirely.
FreshBooks also does not publish its card processing rate anywhere on its pricing page. It lists the payment methods it supports and states that the top Select plan gets lower card fees and capped bank transfer fees. The percentage is not there. So the honest comparison is: $276 or $516 a year in subscription, plus a number you cannot see until you ask.
That asymmetry is worth more attention than it gets. One vendor prints its fee; the other does not. When the fee is several times the subscription, the vendor that hides it is hiding the largest line in your budget. We put the two side by side in Wave vs FreshBooks.
When a spreadsheet is genuinely the right answer
- Under about five invoices a month. A PDF template, a numbering scheme you keep in one file, and a bank transfer. There is no software problem here to solve, and every option on this page is a subscription or a fee in search of one.
- Clients who pay by transfer anyway. Wave Starter at $0 does everything the spreadsheet does, adds recurring invoices and keeps bookkeeping records you can hand to an accountant. Take the free option and skip the argument.
- You need dunning. One late-paying client a quarter justifies automated reminders. That is a Pro feature with online payments enabled — and now you are accepting cards, so the fee conversation is back.
- You are a business with staff. Payroll is the deciding line, not invoicing: $40 a month plus $6 a person on both vendors. Compare that number first; the invoicing tier is the smaller half of the bill.
The rule this article keeps arriving at
Add the fee to the subscription before you compare subscriptions. A $0 plan with a 2.9% fee and a $276 plan with an unpublished rate are not $0 and $276 — they are two unknown totals where one has a known large component and the other has a hidden one. We wrote the general method in how to read a SaaS pricing page, and the same trap appears in every category we cover — see the hidden costs of cheap software and the staged budget in a software budget for a brand-new agency.
What we cannot verify
Subscription prices, client caps and Wave's published processing rates were read from both vendors' pricing pages on October 23, 2026, in USD. FreshBooks' card rate is not published; we have not obtained it through a sales conversation, so no total cost including processing is given for FreshBooks. Our assumption that Wave Pro reverts to $0.60 after the tenth monthly transaction is an assumption — the page says "first 10 transactions/mo" and does not state the rate afterwards. Neither product has been used to issue a real invoice by us, so delivery rates, reminder behaviour and the accounting exports are unverified. See How We Test.